


A Life Less Ordinary

by Eustacia Vye (eustaciavye)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-09
Updated: 2010-11-09
Packaged: 2017-10-13 03:46:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/132485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eustaciavye/pseuds/Eustacia%20Vye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ariadne had never been an ordinary dreamer, even before she met Dominic Cobb.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Life Less Ordinary

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mynuet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mynuet/gifts).



Ariadne knew was that there was a power in her dreams that she didn't seem to have while awake, and that some of her dreams seemed to be so much sharper than others. In those dreams, Ariadne knew how the world worked but was able to bend the rules. Faces held still, but they were always people she knew or had seen at least once before. She knew who they were supposed to be and what they were supposed to do. She knew she was dreaming, but trying to change things was a diversion of sorts. _How much can I change until I break it?_ her dream self would ask. Invariably, she woke herself up that way.

At other times, everything changed in the blink of an eye. Buildings rose and fell all around her, and the things she built in class stood before her in vivid detail. She could rip them apart with her hands or simply point and watch as the mistakes repaired themselves in front of her eyes. She watched towers fall and collapse, crumbling to dust as the ground shook beneath her feet. She stood on the edge of impossible precipices, dangling over voids that yawned wide and threatened to swallow her whole.

Those dreams were like a vast, blank canvas. She could build and manipulate to her heart's content, destroying everything on a whim or recreating it all from scratch.

The faces of people in her dreams were all the same, though. It bothered her on some level. She could create all these fantastic cities, but she populated them with the same faces over and over and over. She tried shifting their faces as she could do with the buildings, but they crumbled and blurred, refusing to change for very long. The same eyes stared back at her and the same lips pulled back into identical grimaces. _Be somebody different!_ she screamed at them, their slack faces and blank eyes staring at her. Maybe features shimmered for a while, but it only served to make her feel dizzy.

Talking with Miles at the university was actually kind of fun. Her friends all seemed to stare at her strangely when talking about building things in her dreams, or trying to change details that were impossible to build in the real world. They lacked imagination that way. Miles, however, had a knowing grin and only encouraged her to continue playing at it. "You'll understand yourself so much more if you see where your limits are," he said. He seemed like the type who had similar dreams in his youth, and Ariadne liked how he treated her as a friend rather than a student. She pushed herself hard in his classes, almost trying to impress him. It took a lot to earn his praise, but it always seemed worth it.

"There's a trick to everything if you look hard enough for it," Miles told her one day over lunch. "Not a shortcut, really. But sometimes, you see things from a different angle and then it's almost like magic. Everything gains clarity, and your designs just _breathe_ as if they were living creatures."

Ariadne had looked at his rapt expression with a grin. "That's what I want," she said, surety in her tone. "That's the kind of architect I want to be."

Miles had nodded. "Yes, I think you can be."

Everything clicked into place the day she sat in a Parisian cafe in the middle of a dream, glass shards flying everywhere around her.

There were new faces in her dreams now, new eyes staring back at her. She teetered on the edge of stairs that stopped abruptly, or walked in an endless circle on stairs that kept moving beneath her feet. Stars burned themselves out overhead, but she could build new ones easily. Her dreams were no longer dark or empty, and the vast void was full of vague shapes just waiting to be created anew.

It wasn't a surprise when she saw Mal in front of her one night. Her thesis defense was in the morning, and her dreams had been full of blank faces sitting in a theater's audience, all staring at her expectantly. There were no eyes to see, no mouths to speak, not even eyebrows to indicate surprise or suspense. Ariadne knew they were all sitting there and waiting for her to do _something,_ but she stood there on the stage not knowing what she had to say.

Mal walked in, high heels clicking on the wooden floorboards, her strides long and sure. She was dressed in a tight black dress, something very similar to the one she had worn in the honeymoon suite before she fell to her death.

"Are you lost, _chère?"_ she asked, her voice soft and gentle. This Mal was nothing like the crazed thing born from the manifestation of Cobb's guilt and grief. This brilliant and beautiful woman was the mother and friend that Arthur remembered.

"I didn't think I was," she admitted softly.

Her smile was rather like the one in pictures with James and Philippa. "We never think we are, do we? Until one day, we find ourselves in a place that we can't recognize and no way back to where we came from." She conjured a chair as if she was a magician and sat down in it. "You changed a man's mind from the inside out. How do you go back to ordinary life after something like that? How do you become the simple dreamer you had been before?"

"I don't know," Ariadne answered, creating a similar chair so that she could sit down across from Mal.

"Wrong answer," Mal said sharply. Ariadne looked at her in surprise. "Did you really think you were an _ordinary_ dreamer before? Would my father ever have recommended an _ordinary_ girl to do the things that you had done?"

"But..."

"The real world is so very mundane," Mal said with a dismissive wave. "So blank and listless, people moving about their day to day lives without even looking where they're going. They _exist,_ but they don't live."

Ariadne suddenly recognized the words coming out of Mal's mouth. She had said them herself to Miles once when talking about one of her more daring project designs. It only brought home the fact that Mal was a projection in her dream, that she was simply saying things that Ariadne herself believed on some level.

Mal had that triumphant look on her face. "You see, don't you?"

"So now what?" she asked, challenging Mal. It was interesting that it would be Mal's face that her mind used as a projection. You only dreamed of faces you've actually seen, but there were all sorts of connotations to seeing Mal.

"Why are you waiting for your life to begin?" she asked, a soft lilt in her voice. "Why don't you take charge of it? You do such a good job in your dreams. We're all waiting for something extraordinary, but you just haven't seen it yet." Mal stood up, skirts swirling around her as if there was a breeze in the room.

Ariadne looked around, and she could see that she wasn't in a theater any longer. She was standing in an open field, vague shapes of houses in the distance. "What do you mean?"

"You can be anything you want to be," Mal replied with a shrug. "You're so driven when you have a goal in mind. You went to _limbo_ for someone you barely even knew to save his mind from being lost. You wanted Cobb to see his children again. Why can't you do the same for yourself?" Her smile was soft, motherly. With a pang, she realized it was her own mother's smile, the last time Ariadne had seen her. "You can be so much more, Ariadne," Mal told her, echoing her mother's last words. "Why do you think you have such an extraordinary name?"

"Fighting in a dream is different than fighting in real life," Ariadne told Mal, not quite able to meet her eyes. Her mother had been a public defender before she had died in a car accident while Ariadne was away at college.

"Why are you so scared of dying? It's only limbo, Ariadne. You've been there. You know what it is. You know it's not anything to truly be afraid of."

"No, it's not the same," Ariadne hissed, staring at Mal. "If it was, I would've seen my mother there."

"You weren't looking for her," Mal reminded her. "You were looking for Dom and Robert. You weren't looking for your mother, so you didn't find her."

"Oh, what's the point?" Ariadne asked, throwing up her hands in frustration. "I'm arguing with myself, here."

"It's a stalling tactic, you know." Mal looked up at the open sky, a perfect shade of blue with only faint traces of wispy clouds. "Because if you argue with me, you don't need to make any decisions. You don't make a move. You don't build. You don't have to make the hard choices."

Ariadne simply stared as Mal looked back down at her. "But playing it safe like that isn't any different from living in limbo. You can be anything you want to be, build anything you want to. It's a gift, Ariadne. Don't be so afraid of it."

 _My mother was gifted, too. Look at where it got her,_ Ariadne wanted to say. But that wasn't fair, and she knew it.

Mal nodded as if Ariadne had spoken aloud, crossing her arms behind her back and beginning to walk along the field. Ariadne sighed and followed her, close enough that she could reach out and touch Mal if she wanted to. "I'm a mother, too. I was gifted at what I did. I was _good._ And I got lost. No point lying about that. I got lost, I couldn't find my way back to reality. I suppose you condemn me for that."

"I don't even really know you."

She laughed mirthlessly. "But you still judge. It's what people do."

"Why are we having this conversation?" Ariadne asked, confused.

"Because you haven't let go of your illusions yet. You haven't really grown up. So you stay in safe places, and you sigh at building conventional things, but on some level you're glad of it. There's no way to fail, no way to truly shine and be outstanding. No way to get noticed, no way to show how gifted you truly can be. But not all of the gifted burn out, you know. Not all the stars die as you watch them."

Ariadne sighed. "I _know_ that."

"But you don't feel that."

"No, I suppose I don't."

"Do you know why you're having this dream tonight, Ariadne?"

"No."

Mal stopped walking. "You haven't yet decided if you want to defend your thesis to the fullest. You haven't yet decided if you want to move on. If you get your degree, you have to choose. You have to grow up. You can't hide behind your student status anymore. You have to choose your path. Do you take a firm that my father suggests and lead the safe life? Or do you follow your heart and chase the path with excitement and danger? Do you continue to hide, or do you become who you really are?"

"What is that, then?"

"An architect. A _dreamer._ She who can lead others into and out of the maze, the one that holds the answers." Mal smiled. "Your mother chose your name well, Ariadne. You are exactly who you need to be. You don't have to be so afraid of it."

"You didn't end up so well."

"The others are fine," Mal answered with a shrug. "And there are other dreamers out there, other lives that haven't been destroyed. It's not the path that breaks people's minds, Ariadne. It's being unwilling to see the path for what it is."

"What's that?" Ariadne asked when Mal stopped speaking to look overhead again.

"A guideline. It's not set in stone, Ariadne. It's just another dream, something else you can shape as you see fit." Mal smiled fondly. "Come now. Time to wake up and decide for yourself what needs to be done." Mal spread her arms wide. "Me? I choose not to be ordinary. I choose to dream, and I give myself over to it freely."

Ariadne's eyes snapped open, Mal's laughter still in her ears. _I choose to dream, Ariadne. Shouldn't you?_

She pushed herself to her feet and shut off her alarm clock. She had her thesis defense in a few hours.

Ariadne looked around her tiny apartment, then nodded to herself, decision made.

***

"I'm glad you came," Ariadne said with a smile.

"I was a little surprised you called me," Arthur admitted. "When I didn't hear from you right away, I thought you'd chosen to stick with being a real world architect. That maybe having things go so badly your first time out scared you away."

"I think I needed a little perspective," Ariadne told him.

"And a doctorate?" he asked with a small smile.

She grinned in response. "It certainly doesn't hurt, does it?"

"No, it doesn't. Though, no one in my line of work necessarily checks references for that kind of thing."

Ariadne nodded. Yusuf caught her eye and she waved at him across the room. Eames was chatting up one of her classmates by the bar, and it looked as though they were hitting it off really well. "I liked the work," Ariadne said, turning back to Arthur. "It's definitely something I'm interested in doing again."

Arthur inclined his head slightly, a smile on his face. "There might be something coming up where an architect would be necessary."

"I've got plenty of free time now," Ariadne told him. "I'd love to help."

His smile widened fractionally. "I did enjoy working with you. Can I meet up with you to discuss the details?"

"Absolutely. I want to build entire cities again. I want to twist them inside out and make mazes." She grinned at Arthur, knowing he understood. "Pure creation. How can I pass that up?"

Arthur absolutely understood, and lifted his glass in salute. "Congratulations, doctor," he said, amusement in his tone. "It's going to be interesting."

"That's all I ask."

Exhilarated, Ariadne clinked glasses with Arthur and drained her glass. This was living and not merely existing. This was exactly what she wanted.

The End


End file.
